"Amélie"

Jeunet has modeled the film on the '30s pictures where each Parisian neighborhood is a small village and all the inhabitants know each other. The movie has echoes of Carne and Prevert's dada comedy "Bizarre, Bizarre," and the delights of Rene Clair, like the musical "Le Million." The trouble is that those movies achieved their charm with the simplest possible means (the smallness was part of the charm) and Jeunet is addicted to gimmickry. He fills the wide screen with bursts of light or a background giving way to a fantasy sequence while the dreamer remains in the foreground, with zooms and cutting and odd angles. It's inventive gimmickry, but it makes the sweetness a concocted thing rather than a natural outgrowth of the material and setting and mood. In Disney's new "Monsters, Inc." it's a joke when the film briefly plunks down in Paris and there's accordion music playing -- that's our movie-fed idea of Paris. But Jeunet uses the same music here without any irony, an old-movie trick to evoke an old-movie response.

"Amélie" has been hailed as a valentine to Paris, but what makes Jeunet's wizardry so ill-suited to that tribute is the whole tradition of French film which located the enchantment of Paris in real settings. The '30s en plein air tradition of shooting on location was later taken up by the new wave directors of the '50s and '60s, who took the camera out of the studios and into the streets. There's more charm in the footage of the actual Parisian streets and cafes of Agnes Varda's "Cleo From 5 to 7" (available beautifully remastered on a Criterion DVD) or, to take more recent examples, in Olivier Assayas' "Irma Vep" or Jacques Rivette's "Va Savoir," than in all of "Amélie."

It's hard to be charmed, hard to think of a movie as a delightful trifle, when you're so conscious of how hard the filmmakers are working to make it charming. I love the idea of "Amélie," and I'm usually a sucker for movies where stray bits and pieces come together in unexpected ways. But "Amélie" never lets you forget that you're being played. It never lets you relax and sink into the fantasy. It's a little like eating at those restaurants where you find your napkin refolded whenever you come back from the restroom -- at some point, such determined pampering becomes oppressive.

The movie's calculation extends to Audrey Tautou. She's adorable all right but everything about her -- from her unkempt Louise Brooks bob to her perpetually big eyes, which keep looking into the camera with conspiratorial mischievousness, to the red slash of a mouth like that of a chaste coquette -- has been carefully designed to be adorable. The movie begins with flashes of Jeunet's particular brand of black humor (particularly the manner of Amélie's mother's death), and there's a great salty gag when Amélie, now a young woman alone in Paris, tries to imagine how many couples are having an orgasm at that moment. Jeunet gives us a razor-sharp, whip-fast montage of couples of all ages and sizes reaching la petite mort, turning the city into a happy cradle of oblivious, ecstatic fucking.

But the film quickly sheds any tendency toward black humor or sensuality in favor of its sexless pixie heroine. Why is it that the kids in "The City of Lost Children" -- the little girl with the knowing air of a doomed, romantic heroine; the toddler who happily gobbled down whatever food he could lay his hands on, a born sensualist; the wised-up tough little street kids -- were so decidedly unsappy, and yet Amélie is meant to be wonderful because she's a wide-eyed little girl? The young man of Amélie's dreams, Nino (actor-director Matthieu Kassovitz), a fellow who collects discarded photo-booth snapshots into albums of random faces, has been given a job as a clerk at an adult video store for seemingly no other reason than for Amélie to look shy and embarrassed when she walks into the place to find him.

Much of the last section of the movie is made up of Amélie's pursuit of Nino, and it's irritatingly pointless. Why does she lead him on a wild goose chase when she's clearly crazy about him? Watching her execute another step in the scavenger hunt she's devised for him is like seeing "The Rules" reimagined by Rube Goldberg. And am I the only one who finds Amélie just a tad creepy? When one of her schemes goes wrong, the movie shies away from suggesting that maybe intervening in other people's affairs can have unwanted consequences -- it's not just Amélie that's blithely unaware of those consequences, it's Jeunet.

Panning "Amélie" is probably the quickest way for a critic to get himself thought of as cynical and unfeeling. But "Amélie" can make you feel divided against yourself: admiring of all the inventiveness that's gone into it even as the calculation of that charm holds you at arm's length. It's not that I don't want to be charmed by a movie (right now, a slice of genuine charm would be manna from heaven). I just don't want to be worked over, prodded into being charmed. It's possible to make a movie about an innocent do-gooder that doesn't drown in sugary goodness. The 1935 "The Good Fairy," an adaptation of the Molnár play written by Preston Sturges, directed by William Wyler and starring the heavenly Margaret Sullavan managed it (and I would bet that Jeunet and his co-screenwriter Guillame Laurant had that movie in mind as one of their models). "Amélie" has the weird effect of people who come up to you at a party and insist that you should have a good time. You might actually enjoy yourself if it just gave you some space.

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